Books

One of the advantages of taking the same kind of classes in college as you did in high school, and of teaching those same subjects again when you graduate, is that you cover the same ground several times. I commenting to some friends the other day that I’m enjoying Pilgrim’s Progress far more during my second round of teaching it–which is probably the third or fourth time I’ve read it through—than I did when I first flipped through its pages. This morning it occurred to me that something similar is going on with St. Augustine’s Confessions.

The Confessions are Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, something like a fourth century Surprised by Joy to those of us who read a lot of C. S. Lewis growing up. An evangelical might call it his testimony, and it certainly resembles the sort of thing you would hear on the Unshackled radio program, where people go through their life story, recount their sins and struggles, and then explain how they turned to Jesus and he changed them. In some ways, Augustine invented the genre.

I’ve read the Confessions three times in its entirety—once in junior high or high school, once in college, and once while teaching it. All three times one particular section stood out as particularly baffling: the pears. Augustine informs us that as a young man he was involved in every kind of debauchery, every kind of vanity or ambition. But rather than dwelling on his sexual misdeeds, his desire to be the world’s best rhetorician, or his obsession with dark or lewd poetry and drama, he spends almost an entire book of his work—what we could call a chapter—exploring this one time he stole some pears when he was a kid.

Listening to a discussion of the Confessions on the Mere Fidelitypodcast, it struck me that there are three solid reasons for Augustine’s strange obsession with this apparently minor peccadillo.

First, human beings have a tendency to let our eye be drawn to interesting or fascinating sins. It’s the sordid adulteries or the bloody murders that catch our eye, or the vaunting ambition of the characters on House of Cards. We don’t particularly care about a kid’s temper tantrum, or a mom taking it out on her husband, or the husband spending his time elsewhere instead of helping out around the house. Minor sins are not interesting.

But sin is not meant to be interesting. Sin is fundamentally a tragedy, a flaw in our character, a flaw in the universe, that separates us from God. It is a thing that corrupts us, and corrupts society. It makes us low and petty, giving up great goods for minor, empty, fleeting pleasures. In focusing on the pears, Augustine draws our eye away from the salacious details of more fantastic sins, and asks us to examine what sin is in itself.

Second, Augustine draw our eye to this sin to draw out the motive behind it. Violence, lechery, gluttony—none of these are much of a mystery. But why did Augustine steal the pears? He was not hungry. It wasn’t because these pears were better than pears he could have gotten elsewhere. In fact, they were worse. He did not have a grudge against the owner of the pears. He suggests the possibility that it might have been to enjoy the fellowship of the friends he stole the pears with. But even then he doesn’t seem to be certain.

At the end of the day, it seems that he stole the pears mostly out of a perverse delight in doing something he knew to be evil. This says something profound about the state Augustine was in, and about human nature generally. We do not sin merely because we want what we cannot have. Sometimes we sin for the pleasure of sinning. We are, deep in our souls, beings that desire to do evil. The depths of this corruption are startling, and call for a truly profound kind of grace to purify us.

The last reason Augustine might dwell on the pears is less theological or philosophical, and more literary. Just as Adam and Eve stole the fruit from the tree in the midst of the garden, and that archetypal sin through the world into disarray, so Augustine steals pears from a forbidden tree, and this sheds light on the disorders of his own heart.

I should point out that none of these insights is entirely new. Each of these topics was something both my secondary school teachers and my college professors dwelt on, and something I tried to pass on to my students. What was new to me was the realization that these things could only have been highlighted by something like the theft of the pears, and not by other, grander sins whose sordid details which might distract us from the point. Augustine’s focus on this particular sin had been baffling before, but now it seems incredibly reasonable.

There is a mentality that sees some value in reading great books, but not in reading them again. It’s true that a first reading can give you a familiarity with the general themes, allow you to understand references made by others educated in the classics, and perhaps give you some sort of bragging rights.

But the value of great books is not merely in giving us access to a cultural conversation, but in teaching and shaping us. By spending time with great minds, great souls, and great imaginations, our own minds, souls, and imaginations are made greater. But in order to see the true measure of what these men have done, it often takes several readings, accumulated life experience, and repeated study. A truly great book should be read again and again, over the course of a lifetime.

The Sage

An old man is riding through the mountains, plodding his was slowly towards the western frontier. Behind him he leaves the luxurious life of the capital, of walking the halls of power, head held high as others bow before him. By the standards of the world, he had reason to be proud. He was a wise man, a cunning counselor, trusted by the rulers of that age. But he is going to the frontier, and has no intention of coming back.

He reaches the last outpost of civilization just as the sun is setting. It is manned by a single, lonely border guard. There are no threats in this direction, no reason for armed camps or grand fortresses. Just wilderness. So the man at the edge of the world is glad when he sees the man coming from its center, and invites him to stay the night.

Over the course of a humble meal and quiet conversation, the guard comes to recognize the stranger’s immense wisdom, as many others have before. He is amazed at the man’s experience, the great things he has seen, the noble people he has known. He goes to sleep that night puzzled, wondering who this stranger might be.

The next morning, as the old wanderer saddles up and prepares to ride away into the unknown west, it dawns upon the border guard who this man is. Finally recognizing this famed councilor of powerful men, this noble sage who moves in the circles of the great, he asks the man one favor before he departs. Would he leave the world with a summary of his teaching?

Smiling, the old man dismounts and picks up a stick laying nearby. Over the next several hours, he scratches out in the dirt a text of poetic simplicity, of refined elegance and deepest wisdom. Having finished, he bows to the humble border guard, and crosses the frontier, never to be heard from again.

The Tao

This world-weary sage was one Laozi or Lao Tsu—that is, Master Lao. If he did indeed exist, he lived in the sixth century before Christ, at about the same time the prophet Daniel was carried off to Babylon. That work he scratched into the ground by the border was the great Chinese classic, the Tao Te Ching, also Romanized as Doadejing. In it, Laozi outlines his philosophy in 81 beautiful, poetic verses, each about the length of a Biblical Psalm.

This philosophy was centered around a single, all-important concept: the Tao. “Tao” literally means “way,” as in a road or path. It can often be found on Hong Kong street signs with no deeper meaning than that. But as a philosophical term, it is much more significant. The Tao is the way the whole cosmos works together, united in a single transcendent plan or system which is greater than any of the individual parts. It is the principle which underlies the behavior of everything in the universe, animate or inanimate, from rain on the mountains, to the flight of the sparrow or the life cycle of a butterfly, to the rise and fall of kingdoms. Not one grain of sand escapes its purpose, and no galaxy is beyond its reach. The Tao encompasses everything.

Attached to this view of the universe in an implicit system of morality, something like natural law in the West. If the universe has its own way, its own set of behavior, men often have a set of intentions contrary to it. We do not pay attention to the way the world is meant to work—the cycles of nature or human behavior, the way apparent opposites work together, or the laws of cause and effect which everything must obey. We have desires, and we rush towards them blindly, fumbling along, disrupting the natural way of things.

Instead, Laozi advocates the principle of wu wei, or sometimes wei wu wei. The English is roughly “action without action.” That is, as things which exist within the Tao, we are assuredly meant to act. However, it is better to act in a way consistent with nature, aware of its underlying principles, rather than fighting against it. Thus we go with the flow of the Tao—we take action, but that action comes from outside us. It is actionless action.

The Disciple

In outlining this philosophy, the Tao Te Ching became a cornerstone of Chinese and East Asian intellectual history. It is something like what Plato’s Republic is to the West, though centuries older. One rough contemporary of Plato, however, was Loazi’s disciple, Zhuangzi.

Zhuangzi—sometimes Romanized as Chuang Tsu, with the second element meaning “Master”—was also a government official, though a minor one. By this time in Chinese history, philosophy had become somewhat more developed, and there were many competing schools. Zhuangzi became a follower of Laozi’s teachings, and authored his own classic as a reflection on these same truths. That classic is often simply called by his name—Zhuangzi.

The Zhuangzi is not a collection of poetic musings, like the Tao Te Ching, but of short stories and anecdotes. These fables are designed to provoke philosophical reflection, asking the reader to consider how limited the merely human perspective is, and how vast the universe. It is the whole Tao we should consider, not merely our own perspective. Of course, many will find this difficult, and it may be that we can only live according to the Tao through some unconscious process or practice, rather than through any apparently easy, conscious effort.

Perhaps it was inevitable than anyone elaborating on Laozi’s philosophy should come across as more skeptical than the original verses. They are a meditation on the Tao itself, while the Zhuangzi often asks us to ponder our own relationship to it. Because that relationship is troubled by human folly, and has to overcome the obstacles of our limited human perspective, the stories can often come across a bit pessimistic. Becoming one with the Tao seems desirable in the Tao Te Ching, and here it appears difficult.

The Zhuangzi also poses more straightforward philosophical problems than its more poetic predecessor. Among them are the famous Butterfly Dream, in which we asked to question how we can distinguish the real world from the dream world—or if there is in fact any difference at all. Where Laozi’s work might find some parallels with Western Stoics, Zhuangzi’s might be more at home with postmodern philosophers.

Five Pecks of Rice

For centuries, Taoism was purely philosophical. It attracted people who, like the founder of the school, sought to escape the troubled world of civilized society to become solitary hermits, at one with nature. Furthermore, its lassaiz-faire, anarchist political tendencies did not exactly promote state sponsorship, or popularity among people who wanted to advance in society. For some time, it seemed merely like an esoteric doctrine suitable only for intellectuals with little ambition. That changed in the second century after Christ.

China’s ancient western frontier lay in the provinces of Sichuan and Shaanxi—the former famous in the United States for restaurants bearing its older Romanization, Szechuan. This was mountainous territory, filled with strange and standoffish hill-folk, with centers civilization concentrated in the fertile river valleys. In troubled times, the more heavily populated provinces of eastern China often turned against each other, and the western frontiers were left to fend for themselves.

The Han dynasty, often considered a golden age, had begun two centuries before Christ and was coming to a slow, painful end two centuries after Him. Palace officials began to interfere in imperial decision-making, there were coups to be fought off, and regional rebellions began disrupting formerly smooth administration of the provinces.

Zhang Daoling lived in this twilight era of the Han dynasty. He had grown up reading Taoist works, and received the best education of his day. He was asked repeatedly to serve as a professor in an imperial college, and even as tutor to the Emperor himself. He refused, preferring his life of seclusion and study. This study included a new element in Taoist philosophy—seeking longevity through practices inspired by Taoist wisdom.

In AD 142, Zhang Daoling declared that Laozi had appeared to him in a vision. This phase of world history would soon be ending, he said, to be replaced by another. Those who wished to survive in the next age must separate themselves from the corruption of their times, and join him in pursuing a Taoist path to holiness. This became known as the Way of the Celestial Masters, and it was popular throughout Sichuan and Shaanxi. A firm commitment was expected of new converts, as seen by the requirement that each prospective adherent donate five pecks of rice to the cause.

Though it may be easy to doubt his followers’ claims that he became an immortal, Zhang Daoling certainly lived to an old age. When he died, first his son and then his grandson succeeded him as head of the movement. His grandson, Zhang Lu, was sent by the Han emperor to quell a rebellion in the west. He obeyed, but upon his victory, he established a new state in the Hanzhong valley as a haven for those who followed the Way of the Celestial Masters. This became known as the Five Pecks of Rice Rebellion.

This new state, with its devotion to Zhang Daoling’s apocalyptic version of Taoism, seemed to prosper for a time. Each citizen’s name and their stage in the progress towards holiness was recorded. It was understood that those who had progressed to a higher stage could command divine generals in the spiritual war against demonic forces. Lawbreakers were not punished by ordinary means, but expected to confess their crimes, and were told to seek penance through solitary meditation or do good deeds on behalf of the community. What had once seemed an esoteric philosophy had, with the addition of other elements, become the religious and political philosophy by which the community lived.

In the meantime, the Han dynasty had dissolved into three warring kingdoms, each with their own claimant for the imperial throne. This period would last for less than a century, but the epic nature of the events which shaped it have turned the era into a common setting for tales of romance and high adventure in eastern Asian storytelling.

One of the three rulers, a man named Cao Cao, attacked Zhang Lu, driving him from his kingdom. Cornered in eastern Sichuan, Zhang Lu surrendered. After a brief quarter century of independence, Hanzhong was reincorporated into the mainstream of Chinese civilization.

But the Five Pecks of Rice Movement did not end with the fall of its independent kingdom. Zhang Lu was relocated to Cao Cao’s court in the kingdom of Wei. There he used his authority as a religious leader to reinforce the legitimacy of the kingdom of Wei over the other two kingdoms. His followers spread throughout the realm, and by the time China was reunited under the Jin dynasty, Taoism had become mainstream.

Wisdom of the Ages

Not only had it become mainstream, it had also become explicitly religious. Followers now worshiped Laozi and others who had achieved immortality through Taoist teachings and practices. Zhang Daoling’s emphasis on the pursuit of longevity had also brought it in close proximity to a wide variety of shamanistic sects which promised supernatural powers to those with the right knowledge—or those willing to pay them. Though the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi still formed the center of Taoist teachings, other elements had been introduced which had changed it almost beyond recognition.

One of the central texts that defined Taoism in its new, more religious guise was the I Ching. The I Ching was far older than the Tao Te Ching, its origins shrouded in mystery. On its most basic level, it was a divination manual, telling the reader how to determine the right course of action based on the manipulation of certain mystical symbols. On a deeper level, though, it came to be understood as a complex and symbolical explanation of how the cosmos worked—how heaven was reflected on earth, how the five elements interacted, and how yin and yang could be found in every other operation of the universe.

Incorporating the I Ching into Taoism, along with the worship of a new pantheon of immortals, transformed the abstract philosophy into a full-blown religious tradition, distinct from both Buddhism and Confucianism. Much as Plato’s teachings had begun in pure philosophy and ended by inspiring Gnostic heresies and late antique magical systems, so Laozi’s teaching had become something else entirely.

In this form, however, those teaching had gained a wider appeal, and even official imperial support. Multiple times throughout history, Taoism was considered a leading candidate for becoming the official religion of the Chinese state. It influenced the other two major religious traditions as well, and many minor ones, and it was soon understood that a man could not be truly educated, could not be truly cultured, if he was not familiar with the writings of Laozi and Zhuangzi. Thus, despite undergoing great change, their ideas had become an integral the culture of one of humanity’s greatest civilizations.

A Translator’s Puzzle

Christianity is a proselytizing faith. When the West began interacting with China on a regular basis, it would not be long before missionaries came to translate the Bible into Chinese dialects. This did not begin happening on a large scale until the nineteenth century. When it did, translators were often puzzled by words that had a technical meaning in the original Hebrew or Greek for which there might not be a good equivalent in Chinese. One particular problem was found in the first chapter of the Gospel of John:

“In the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God, And the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, And without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, And the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, And the darkness does not comprehend it.”

The casual English reader might be struck by the poetry of the passage, without necessarily finding any difficult words. For the translator familiar with the culture of the early Roman Empire, however, it presents quite the puzzle.

The Greek word for “Word” in this passage does not simply mean “a thing you say.” That would be “lexis,” but here the manuscript says “logos.” Logos does mean “word,” but it is also a technical term from Greek philosophy. It means something like “rational order” or “logical principle.” It is the reason the world acts the way it does, the transcendent plan that guides the functioning of all of nature. With the Stoics in particular, it came to be something divine, a sort of pantheistic deity that was the same as nature itself. For them, it was simultaneously the explanation for why the world behaved the way it did, and a moral guide for those living in it. Not long after Christ, drawing on that Stoic tradition, a Jewish philosopher named Philo of Alexandria adapted the logos to his faith. It was the rational principle by which the Biblical God had created the universe.

Confronted with this word, the nineteenth century translators scrambled for something that might have a similar meaning. Clearly a word that just meant “word” would not do. It needed to carry those crucial philosophical connotations which lend John’s words so much weight.. So they chose Tao.

Just like the logos, the Tao was the principle behind all of nature, the thing that explained the way nature behaved. It was the quasi-divine force or plan which directed everything, and which human beings would do well to seek to understand. Though not identical, the two concepts were very clearly similar.

And thus Taoism, Greek philosophy, and the Christian Gospel were united in a single passage of the Chinese Bible: Jesus is the Tao, the Logos. He was in the beginning with God, and was God, and all things were made through him. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men—men who could not comprehend it. Jesus was identified as Laozi’s mysterious Tao, but—perhaps to Zhuangzi’s shock and protest—in human form.

Of course, this does not mean that the translators saw Christianity as just another form of Taoism. The Incarnation alone appears to violate Taoist understandings of reality, as perhaps does the concept of divine revelation in the first place, at least when set against early philosophical Taoism. Furthermore, this single passage in John is qualified by the rest of Scripture, a context which stands apart from, and often perhaps against, much of Taoist tradition. Nevertheless, the way the concepts align, the apparent appropriateness of the word choice, this strange meeting of Eastern and Western concepts—these things are certainly worth thinking about.

The Tao of the Blog

Every so often I have a little crisis trying to figure out what this blog is for. This is not really the place for a serious academic essay, but it’s not the place for mere personal status updates either. I have Facebook for the latter, and am not particularly qualified for the former. If I just want to post links to interesting articles, there’s Twitter. If I had a particular hobby or area of expertise I wanted to share, this might be the place, but I have few which are so readily shareable. What kind of writing does a blog lend itself to?

Blogs do seem well adapted to relatively ephemeral content. A post arises, perhaps it occasions a conversation in the comments, and then it disappears into the archives as other posts arise to take its place. You can search those archives, but people rarely do without good reason.

Blogs are also good places for informal musings. This blog in particular does not belong to any company or institution, but to some random guy in East Texas. Many blogs are like that. Thus they are good places for random people to talk about whatever interests them, without necessarily requiring them to stick to a specific topic, or meet academic or professional standards when it comes to things like sources. This is just some guy talking.

But unlike Facebook or Twitter, blogs are both formatted for longer articles and designed to be read by a wider audience. This promotes guys talking at length about what interests them, in a way that might interest casual passersby.

In accordance with the principle of wu wei—at least, as I understand it—it pays to cut with the grain of the medium. The nature of a blog makes it a great place to take something like the Tao Te Ching or the Zhuangzi chapter by chapter and muse out loud about its meaning, its connections to other classic works and to pop culture, and whatever lessons these things might have for those who read them.

I am not an expert on these books. I have never taken a class on them in particular, or on Taoism in general, or even on Eastern religions. But I do enjoy learning about these things, and if my learning can be to the profit of other casual readers who might be interested in the topic, it is well worth the effort to spruce up my musings and publish them on this blog.

So this introduction to Taoism is more than an interesting story, though I hope has been that. It is an invitation. I am going to start working my way through the Tao Te Ching verse by verse, posting my thoughts here. If you are interested, please read along and comment below. Learning works best in community, and I would find it a blessing if my blog could provide a little of that.

The Hyborian Age—where all the women were supple and all the men had mighty thews.

The world of Conan is a riot of wildly diverse races, cultures, and civilizations. Roman-inspired troops fight pseudo-Egyptians, there are echoes of Babylon and Persia, grim Celto-Germans, fearsome steppe nomads, and Picts that more closely resemble a caricature of native Americans than ancient British tribes. Speaking of native Americans, there are Aztecs too, or perhaps Mayans, though considering one of their number is named “Olmec,” it’s hard to tell. An Iranistan resembling old Orientalist legends of the Ottoman Empire butts up against a desert filled with Cossacks and a distant pseudo-India. The Far East is out there somewhere, and the jungles, plains, and deserts of “the Black Kingdoms.”

This incoherent mix of cultures from every era and part of the world is engaged in a constant struggle for survival, where only the mightiest races can survive. And race is very key in the story. If you cut Howard, he bleeds with that old style of Darwinian racism that is no longer in vogue among scientifically minded progressives. The darker the skin, the more savage—usually—the person. Peoples’ characters are defined by their bloodlines, genetics having a strange amount of weight in an otherwise Nietzschean, will-centered story universe.

The overall effect is an intriguing one. Are Aquilonians Roman or high medieval France? How did a Mesoamerican people sprout out of what appears to be Egyptian stock? Are the Egypt-inspired Stygian sorcerers actually any different from the Shemite villains Conan meets elsewhere? Are the Cimmerians Celts, or Germans, or Scythians, or something else altogether? What is the difference between the black men whose race makes them little more than animals in Conan’s sight, and the black men Conan is willing to call his friends?

This wild riot is intriguing. There’s always something new—if not terribly so—and each piece of the puzzle is just suggestive enough to make you want to fit them all together, to form a coherent view of Conan’s world. At every turn, however, you are confronted with contradictory bits of information, or some strange new problem that destroys the picture you thought was coming into view. Still, the fruitlessness of the exercise does not diminish its effect. With each new story, you are drawn into the world and wondering at every new and exotic person, city, custom, or creature that comes around the corner.

While Howard’s Darwinian racism is more central to his stories, and expressed in far more violent outbursts than in those of his friend, H. P. Lovecraft, it is qualified in an interesting way. Though Conan looks down in contempt at so many peoples for being uncivilized and barbaric, barbarism is clearly something both Conan and his creator admire. There is something more primal and more excellent about a wild man, a barbarian, a wolf in human form, than in the soft folk of more civilized stock. It is always the city folk who are the first to die, and one particular story makes it startlingly clear that all civilization goes this way. In Conan’s world, the natural state of man is wild barbarism, barely elevated above the animals. That is the place where human excellence thrives, and all civilization must ultimately bow before this fact as it is swept away in the sands of time and only the strong, the wild, the primitive remains. In such a world, how seriously can we take the supposed inferiority of Pictish hordes or Afghuli tribesmen?

Conan himself is an interesting puzzle. Like Superman, he’s impossible to beat, but he is far more cynical than that golden-age American hero. The only law he recognizes is survival, the only good he knows is the pleasure of his own belly—supple women, power, and gold. Indeed, the coldly predatory way he sometimes treats women is shocking, despite Howard’s unwillingness to cross certain lines or his studied avoidance of any entirely explicit sexual content. Conan is a creature powered largely by his lizard brain, made unstoppable by the might of his arm and his rough upbringing in the hills of Cimmeria.

Then again, Conan sometimes does make a moral choice. He saves a woman rather than treasure, goes back to save a newly-met traveling companion rather than fleeing to safety. Sometimes this is waved away with a cynical comment about how it was in his own self-interest in a roundabout way, or the careless acknowledgment that risking his neck like that was a poor choice, one he probably will not repeat. But sometimes it seems like Conan is developing human qualities that have little to do with the primitive pleasure-centers of his brain. There might be some character hiding under all the raw barbarian muscle.

The Lovecraft connection really cannot be ignored. Nods are given to that mythos, certainly, but they share a larger underlying logic. Lovecraft sets out in his work to tear down man’s presumptuously anthropocentric view of the universe. He does so by introducing his characters to inhuman beings of great antiquity, of vast power, and who little notice or care what happens to feeble humankind. Entire civilizations struggled up from the slime before us, many dwell beside us, and many more will outlive us. We are less than a footnote in the annals of cosmic history.

Howard also takes a crack at our anthropocentric presuppositions, but from another point of view. Rather than drawing attention to what gods or monsters might exist beyond the limits of our knowledge—though they certainly do exist in this world—Howard draws attention to our own continuity with the forms of life below us. All too often, Conan stumbles across a race of men that look and act a little too apelike. At other times, he runs across apes that act far too human. Conan himself is often said to have more in common with a jungle dragon or a wild wolf than he does with civilized men. He even knows the name and sign of a god the animals worship but man has long forgotten. Always we are reminded that men are merely beasts, and beasts may be more cunning, or stronger, than men. After all, many races of man have little more intelligence than the apes from which they are descended. The illusion that we are special is constantly dashed.

This is why racism is so prominent in Conan’s world. It’s the entire point. Man is just another beast in the struggle for survival. At any point he is arising from another species of ape, or diverging along two evolutionary paths. Just as the Atlanteans once overcame the other stocks of men in their world, and the Hyborians overcame the new races of men after the Cataclysm, so the “sons of Aryas” will soon wipe out what is left of Conan’s world and a new stock of human will come to dominate the surface of the planet—an event of far less consequence than such a creature might think. History is nothing but a succession of species eliminating its competitors and spreading its seed.

That, by the way, also makes the religion of the Hyborian world a far more brutal thing than in many other settings. There is no reverence among the followers of the gods, except on the part of the weak minded and easily killed. One might expect religion to be a superstition in this world, but it is not. No, the gods exist, but they are just another form of life, one more powerful than man, one that might be persuaded to help him if given the right incentive. The gods of Conan’s age are things to be cynically bartered with in acts barely distinguishable from either the summoning of a demon or the hiring of a mercenary. They are far from holy.

This is what makes the Conan movie so very different from these stories. The racism is toned far down, and the gods, though hardly treated with reverence, do not figure as hugely or as savagely in the darkness behind their sorcerous servants as they do in Howard’s originals. Where the written Conan is essentially an escapist fantasy where we get to follow the ubermensch around as his slays, lays, and plunders his way across an exoticized version of our own past, the film is a more sensitive treatment of the riddle of steel, of man’s heart and will and strength. It also asks Conan what is best in life—and wants you to seriously consider the answer as the film proceeds. While Howard’s stories certainly have some deep themes, it is rare that he explores them so philosophically. He sees, perhaps, far less meaning in life than the filmmakers, and far less wisdom to be gained from contemplating it.

Overall, the original Conan the Barbarian stories are quite a diverting smattering of adventures. Though the language gets a bit repetitive and the world never quite coheres, the zest with which Conan engages his world, the thrill of combat, of survival in dire circumstances, the wonder of strange lands—all can keep the reader spellbound for hours at a time. While I wouldn’t want to spend entire novels in this world, the occasional vacation there is enjoyable. It’s not hard to see how it inspired so many imitators and retellings. It’s quite the ride. Particularly “Beyond the Black River.”

Conan’s hand fell heavily on her naked shoulder.
“Stand aside, girl,” he mumbled. “Now is the feasting of swords.”

In my experience, starting anything with a qualification softens the blow of a potentially offensive point far too much. But my fantasy-nerd street cred is probably lower than it ought to be right now, and I am attacking what seems to be one of the biggest selling genres of the day. So, let me just say that I love fantasy, I love coming-of-age stories, and I love coming-of-age fantasy stories–when they are done well.

The problem is that our artistic culture is stupid. It is filled with artsy artists, who tend to be insecure, introspective brats who like to dream up a world with themselves at the center. On top of that, people who are coming of age are some of the most self-centered people on the planet. Combine the two, and you have a recipe for annoying.

How many stories of this type have you read, or even watched? Now tell me if the following seems to accurately describe your experience: 1) protagonist is incredibly gifted, 2) protagonist is horribly misunderstood, 3) protagonist finds himself in situations demanding far too much of him, but through his aforementioned giftedness and some cheesy variant on finding himself manages to come out okay, and 4) all those people who horribly misunderstood him are either publicly proven wrong or else our victorious hero has for his own ends chosen to allow his natural inferiors to continue in their pitiful ignorance. Sound familiar? I swear I’ve read it a million times.

This is annoying on so many levels. For one, coming of age stories can actually be awesome. I mean, this is where kids discover things like the opposite sex, their vocation, what it means to take risks and be responsible, real good guys and real bad guys, the passage of time, and how cool the world actually is. Not to mention the magical ability to suddenly understand some of the most important people in their lives–their parents. That is an era of life and a process that is rich with themes and characters and potential plotlines. Wasting it on “poor me, I’m misunderstood” is just stupid.

Then there’s the fact that it essentially ruins the fantasy genre. What is awesome about fantasy, what draws most people to it (or draws me to it, anyways), is the fact that it deals with the world on this grand, sweeping, epic scale full of wonder, excitement, and discovery. You can be taken on an Odyssey that introduces you to so much that is new, so much that has never been seen before, and then do cool things with all that new stuff. It is just plain fun. And a misunderstood teenager story limits the vast potential of fantasy into the most cramped of possible spaces–the distance between the two ears of a kid who won’t grow up.

That is, of course, the central irony with this trend. I don’t have a problem so much with protagonists who think they are misunderstood–I’m not sure any teenager doesn’t think that–no, I have a problem with a story that says they are right. That kind of story, where junior proves his superior wisdom over society or the authority figure, that’s a coming of age story where absolutely no one comes of age. There is no growth, only the increasing rot of an already bad egg.

But like I said, I don’t mind if the character starts out that way. In fact, I would love to see a coming of age story where that fantasy setting is used beat the living angst out of the kid, pitch him out of his own skull, and let him discover the awesomeness of the world around him. As in, the world and its inhabitants which are awesome, not him or his skills or his gifts or specialness. A coming of age fantasy that is humbling. That I would love.

Now, I’m sure they are out there, somewhere in books that aren’t fifty year old products of awesome British Christian academics. Somewhere, someone alive and kicking has written a non-winy-misunderstood-teenager style coming of age fantasy, and possibly even written a good one. But where? Honestly, have you heard of one?